The Butterfly Project
by Winterfield
Summary: Being reborn in the Naruto world could have gone wrong so many ways. Being reborn as Sakura... couldn't. If only it were that simple. Self-Insert OC/SI
1. Of Death, Rebirth and One-Sided Dialogue

What would you do if one day, after nineteen and a half years of life, you found out that everything you've ever known about the universe has been a lie?

This question may have been somewhat misleading. Most of the really dramatic ones were, and I was no stranger to disregarding pesky things like reality in favor of drama.

For one thing, it stretched the definition of 'one day' quite a bit.

Oh, death hit me with no warning, that part was true. I didn't do drugs, didn't drink and didn't even know the kind of people who could put my life in danger. The closest thing I had to a terminal illness was being really unfit, and I suppose I also didn't hear so well. Very promising for a tragic end, I know.

Death has been painful and messy, but if it took more than the few minutes I remembered, then I wasn't awake to feel it.

After that, I had months upon months to realize what happened. Just over half a year, to be precise. That's when everything went to hell.

I was rather proud to say I've anticipated it.

For another thing, nobody actually lied to me. Not my teachers, not the scientists whose work I was taught, not the people on the internet who were so convincing when they explained why parallel worlds couldn't exist. Not even my mother, when I told her in elementary school that my friend told me people got reincarnated when they died and she laughed at us both.

You can't lie when you truly believe what you are saying.

Overtly, my favorite pet question was no more important that any number of others I could have asked. I lost everything that day, and gained so much for it. If I tried to illustrate the role I was given the moment I woke up in Sakura Haruno's body, I would ask, 'What would you do if you were given the chance to tailor your life from the moment you were born in accordance to knowledge of the future no one but you possessed?'

And believe me, I did ask myself that question. On the days I wasn't busy mourning, I did nothing but ask myself just that and I still wasn't convinced my answer was the right one.

On those other days, my question of choice was, 'How would you feel if you lost every single person you've ever known on the way from school to the tram station?' – This one was no less profound, and just as good at illustrating how life-changing what happened to me was.

(As you may have noticed, I really liked dramatic questions. They were almost as neat as nonchalant one-liners.)

The difference was that once upon a time, when I was just a twelfth-grader trying to catch the tram twenty minutes earlier, I wouldn't have known how to begin answering that first one.

Nineteen years didn't sound like a whole lot of time. For some people, they weren't. Sure, in this world, it was more than enough to get yourself killed in battle a hundred times over. Even in my old world, there were people that age who've spent years tending to themselves, some who've already started families, others who've pointed a gun at another human being and watched them bleed… but at the particular parts of that world I've lived in, at that particular time, being nineteen meant being an adult in name only. You spent all that time learning how to do things, never finding out what it was like to actually do them.

I had plans, back then. I had… not ambitions, because ambition was inherently tied to cheesy concepts like believing in yourself. On the bright side, whatever meager goals I've set for myself weren't unrealistic. All I wanted was to finally get out of my parents' sight, study a moderately interesting subject in a moderately good university and then spend my life a productive member of society. Maybe take a few non-mandatory courses along the way, just so I could say over dinner that I've done something exceptional.

I didn't get the chance to live anything close to what we would call a 'full life'. Nineteen and a half years just weren't enough time.

It was, however, more than enough to shape your entire worldview; everything you believed it, the way you saw anything from humanity to politics to the creation of the universe. The nature of death too, I suppose. I had yet to hear anyone claim their childhood didn't shape who they were unless they were trying very, very hard to convince themselves of that exact idea.

I used to be... if not agnostic, as such, then at least opposed to unfounded belief. I didn't understand hard science, my marks would attest to that, yet I somehow came to regard it as law. It only made sense, at the time.

Imagine my surprise when it dawned on me – slowly, gradually – that I have died and didn't stay dead. That I was a baby again. A baby, lying in its crib and trying very hard to convince itself that comas did, in fact, work this way.

At first, it were the little things, the 'being reborn' part of the equation, I tried to deny; being so much smaller than others, the occasional glimpse of my face when someone carried me past a mirror, the fact that for all intents and purposes, I was treated like an infant.

My 'father' had pink hair. I dismissed it as a really daring choice for dye at the time.

Everyone kept calling me by a name that wasn't mine. Just as easy to dismiss, when I only understood the barest basics of the language spoken around me.

My real mother was nowhere in sight.

(Until now, I never believed missing someone could physically hurt. Turns out those paranormal romance novels got something right after all.)

My vision got progressively better, so I could no longer miss the evidence for the 'in the Naruto world' part. The blonde woman who replaced my mother took me outside almost every day, whether to shop or chat with her friends or to visit my 'father' in the shop where he worked. If nothing else, it was easy to see that the architecture and fashion and the people were nothing like in modern-day Japan. Or any time in Japan. Or any time anywhere.

I've had a few months to flush through all kinds of weird theories, all kinds of locations, to the point that my ideas progressively got more absurd than the truth. Then my hair started to grow. It didn't matter where I was on earth. Hair wasn't supposed to be pink.

I've even seen glimpses of dark-clad people jumping from roof to roof – not over small gaps and from high to low, like one would in Parkour, but like… well… like Naruto characters.

Oh, and then there was the Hokage monument.

It was a mountain-sized sculpture of four faces, constantly looming over the village. Being seen was the whole point of that thing. It's not like I could just _overlook_ it.

Really, it took a special kind of obtuseness to miss that I was a newborn baby… That I was _a manga character_ as a newborn baby. By all rights, I should have realized what happened right away instead of waiting to wake up to the sound of peculiar medical beeping. Barring a really elaborate hallucination or a hilariously expensive prank with supernatural elements, all evidence pointed towards me having miraculously replaces Sakura.

It wasn't even that I didn't know what happened. The bare facts were all there, and I've read the fanfiction. It was just that the last thing I wanted to do was put the pieces together. If I did, it would mean that I'd never, ever get to go home again. That somewhere, in another world, my family was mourning. (A small part of me wondered if anyone else would.)

It just could be true, right?

I didn't believe it, but I did eventually reach a sort of exasperated acceptance. Six months weren't much when they stood between you and a dreaded exam period. When you spent as much time – and that's what it always came down to, time - unable to communicate beyond smiling and crying, it was the next best thing to being locked inside your own head. Constant panic and denial didn't make for good company.

So I fell into a rhythm of only thinking hypothetically. As in, if I hypothetically managed to land myself in Sakura's body, when would her birth be in relation to Naruto's? All I knew was that if, hypothetically, this world was the same as the manga canon, then Sakura – and thus me – would be older than Naruto.

How much older? Who knows.

Whenever I saw the monument, I couldn't help but stare at the Fourth Hokage. The idea of giving myself away (hypothetically, of course) didn't appeal to me in the slightest, but I still sort of wished I could warn Naruto's parents in advance. Just in case I was wrong and it was true.

"I need to speak to the Hokage," I told my 'parents' one evening at the dinner table. In English. "I know the future. We're going to be attacked by the Kyuubi."

At least I tried to tell them that in English. Unsurprisingly, my mouth couldn't quite form the words. My tongue was too lax, my mouth not yet meant for speech, and all that came out was senseless gibberish.

The two adults seemed to find it hilarious.

"Mebuki, she said 'Hokage'!" the pink haired man said between bursts of laughter, evidently disregarding the rest as baby babble. Even the word 'Kyuubi'. Right, of course. The attack hasn't happened yet.

Well, there have been anglicisms in the manga. It seemed worth a try.

I babbled some more.

One other day, a rather more significant one, I neutrally sat at my mother's hip and watched as she picked out vegetables to buy. I knew the names for them all by now, and the fruit too, and the faces of half the old women who sold them, and I've long since learned that acting appalled when the people who were supposed to be my parents carried me around created more problems than it solved. Mothers seldom reacted to crying children by putting them somewhere and waiting for them to shut up.

Everything around me felt so incredibly real that I had to remind myself I didn't believe in it several times a day.

It was technically possible, perhaps even preferable, that I was in a coma. The thought itself wasn't nice nor very sane, since there was no reason why my brain would manufacture such a complex illusion based solely on a manga series; I'll admit that I never read much about comas and any type of accident-induced brain damage, but surely, getting a car to the head wouldn't be good for ones coherence? Why was it, then, that my surroundings seemed to function exactly like reality except for the minor detail that I was in Konoha?

I was picking up new words, for God's sake.

On the other hand, compared to the idea that the whole universe may have gone insane, my brain alone seemed like the lesser of two evils. Also, the loss of my family. That was reason enough for my forced state of denial, even if I had to actively work to maintain it.

My coma theory finally dropped dead with the sight of the Nine-Tailed Fox rising at the horizon.

"Look!" the lady at the vegetable stand screamed, pointing at the sky. Tomatoes rained down from the wooden stand.

"What the hell?!" someone else, a generic-looking man, yelled in the same direction. At least I thought that's what he screamed. I could have sworn I've heard those words before, accompanied by the very same subtitle.

I could feel my mother be physically taken aback while others started to run in the opposite direction. She held me with both hands and started to do the same.

Me, I couldn't do anything, so I stayed as quiet as I could.

And stared.

There was a bizarre moment when I tried to decide how I was supposed to feel right now. Scared? I wasn't scared.

There were good reasons for that. Somehow, in all the commotion, I took the moments to think about it. I've half-expected it, even sort of anticipated being terrified. That's how you felt when you were a civilian under attack. Helpless and terrified.

Except...

Sakura was meant to survive, so it would be reasonable to assume that I would, too-

Except maybe not.

Still, I wasn't scared. I have, after all, died a few months ago. What could I possibly lose if it happened again?

My mother was holding me with both hands now as she ran, like she feared I might slip away. I wished I could reassure her. She wasn't my family, but I was her daughter; disconnected as I was, I could almost picture my real mother mourning over a grave, her face replaced with Mebuki Haruno's…

It was a whole lot of picturing when all I needed to see the destruction in the village was to open my eyes.

I hadn't realized I'd closed them.

All around me, there were ninja jumping and barking orders. In the distance, there was fire and screams and the fox-

The pictures of it, all friendly and redeemed and fighting alongside the heroes, conspicuously refused to appear. It may have been the sheer size of the thing, the fact that it shouldn't have been real, or maybe it was the screaming that threw me off. Screams of real, breathing people, not characters. Some of them wouldn't breathe for long. The fourth Hokage was bound to be fighting out there somehow, but I didn't see fighting, just destruction.

Ah, so that's what it was. I was probably just in shock. If I knew myself at all, I'd make up for not being scared later.

A ninja – yeah, that's definitely what he was – jumped down from a nearby roof and gave out a fast-paced string of orders. People started to gather around him.

Evacuation. Thank God.

_You don't believe in God_, I reminded myself, somewhat haughtily.

My mother said something, tried to argue with another ninja. He appeared to have won. Then we were led somewhere, a group of civilians of all possible ages, several of them carrying children. Real children. If they died, what good would getting reincarnated do them?

No, no, we were being evacuated. These particular ones weren't going to die. Some wouldn't be so lucky.

One of the Chunin was behind us and I could clearly see he was getting impatient with our pace. He was holding a kunai in one hand, as if it would help him against the fox. Maybe it was more like a security blanket. Why did I think he was a Chunin again? He looked younger than I was. Ah, right, the flak jacket.

I had no idea what was happening, but it seemed like we were zigzagging around the wreckage, looking for a clear route that didn't require any climbing. At one point, the Chunin in the back went to help the one in the front lift something that blocked the way. My mother tried to ask something, as did several others. I couldn't understand the answers.

Then, a short hike through chaos and vertigo later, we were in some kind of a stone structure. The ground still shook and the fox was still there, but I could no longer see it. There were people here already, civilians and young ninja with no flak jackets guarding them. Shelters, then. The only shelters I've been to were sealed underground rooms with bare gray walls, meant to protect against missiles and chemical weapons. It's only ever been as rehearsal, never under an actual attack, while this...

This wasn't my world.

I suddenly remembered I had no idea where my 'father' was. I still didn't know what to think of him. I did know that if he died, I'd be real; a real person dying. I would be sad, even.

"Sakura, are you alright?" my mother asked, looking somewhat dazed. A question I had no trouble understanding, for once. I nodded, then realized I shouldn't have. Sitting on the hard floor miserably, she didn't seem to notice. Instead, she cradled me with too much force, like I might slip away.

It was still uncomfortable, being touched like that by a grown woman, but less uncomfortable than it's been yesterday.


	2. The Metaphysical Merit of Fanfiction

It was within hours of the Kyuubi attack that I first asked myself 'Why?'

Of course, that was hardly the first thing I did when it was over. First, I waited. Then I did what any sensible person would do after their home of six months got wrecked by a giant monstrous cartoon character: I cried.

Before the attack was even over, I've anticipated the fit, and I've anticipated it to come in something of an afterthought. It didn't disappoint. The moment we were allowed to leave the shelter, my mother started to make her way through the endless stream of stabbing elbows in obvious panic and I, well, I started to cry. What I was crying about, I wasn't sure; it just seemed like the thing to do. The simple explanation would be that I just got through something that would be considered a traumatic experience by my old world's standards – and for once, by this one's as well. If the manga was anything to go by, nobody would remember this day fondly.

I didn't like to think about it this way. I didn't get hurt. My parents didn't get hurt (and not coincidentally, it was during the Kyuubi attack that I started to consciously think of them as such). Minato and Kushina… they were great characters. When the flashback of their death was shown, I cried and cried and cried. Even now, I had this little pang of doubt: Could I have saved them? What would have happened if I believed a little earlier, if I tried a little harder?

But when you got down to it, I only knew Naruto's parents as characters.

It was too early to mourn, anyway. You had to wait until the bodies were scrubbed off the floor, at least.

The complicated explanation would be that something far worse than an attack that didn't even hurt me personally happened months ago and I've only now accepted it enough to feel any particular way about it, other than defiant. Yeah, that was probably it.

When everyone else would mourn their neighbors and friends, defenders and leader, I would mourn the family I've left behind. They may not have died, but I owed them that much at least.

Either way, the crying was over pretty quickly. My mother, who wasn't used to me crying for any reason that wasn't physically discernible, was rather desperate in her attempts to calm me down. It stripped the whole affair of its initial charm. I supposed knowing in advance that you were going to break down helped as well.

In the commotion of ruined streets, panicking ninja and displaced civilians, it took hours upon hours until we were reunited with my father. Still holding me, my mother made her best impression of tearfully falling into his arms, the hypocrite.

At that point, I could hardly remember why I was worried anymore. Sakura wasn't an orphan, that much was common sense. The blond woman, though, had no such guarantees. She hasn't been graced with the opportunity to half-expect and half-dread the attack before it happened.

She didn't know how the tragedy was caused and how its memory would later be tainted when the villagers would shamelessly blame their savior's son.

So she cried.

With the flabby hand of a six-month-old, I patted her head twice.

"Oh, Sakura," she said and continued talking in the uncharacteristically soft voice she's first used in the shelters. Normally, it was her husband who spoke softly. Now, both of them were treating me like I was a baby made of glass, rather than a baby made of whatever it was babies were made of. Gah, biology.

I wondered what they'd think if they found out what I really was.

It was nonsense, really, to feel guilty about this. I knew it was. I couldn't possibly develop a guilt complex about something I didn't do - something that has been done to me, even, if I could consider it a caused event. While the adults made their way home through the eerily colorless village, I was left with a question.

It wasn't just this one. As always, there were plenty of other questions to ask concerning the metaphysics of my situation, the dreaded moral implications of it ('Shall I keep it a secret?' got its answer by default, but 'What about the real Sakura?' just made me shudder) and the ever-important question of what the hell I was supposed to do with my knowledge. I didn't want to give myself away, not now that my chance to change this one thing has withered away.

Later. I would have time later.

The sheer melodrama of asking 'Why me?' made me marvel at myself for a bit, but it was a legitimate question.

When I was a child the first time around, maybe nine or ten, I suffered a fit of fascination with the idea or rebirth. It was a long time ago, a year or two before I've first heard of Naruto, and started with a supposedly true story about a Druze man. It wasn't a very interesting story nor a very long one. The man died in a car accident; a mundane, average death. It didn't live up to the prevalence of, say, heart disease, but managed to off quite a few people nonetheless.

Seven years later, he came to visit his now-adult son in the body of a boy.

Without all the embellishment and the details I forgot, that was pretty much it, the whole story. Besides finding it anticlimactic at the time, I couldn't help but question why one man would be allowed to keep his memories. Souls were great and everything, but wasn't the sum of our experience what made us… us?

At the time, as a child with little to no understanding of religion, I simply thought it was compelling and incredibly far fetched. Now, I wondered how good a person would have to be in order to keep what I considered to be their very self after death – because that was it, wasn't it? Earning your next life. The concept of Samsara, though different in almost every other way, was similar in this one respect. There were religions that incorporated it along with infinite universes, even. It would have been oh-so-convenient if I knew enough about Hinduism and Buddhism to be able to decide whether they could be used to explain me.

I had no idea where other notions of reincarnation came in. The gloomy view of the afterlife in the Shinto religion. The confusing references to reincarnation Judaism let slip once in a while. The all-too-real and frankly nutty way things worked here, with the local version of the original sin resulting in people capable of playing around with others' souls a few centuries down the line.

Also, fanfiction. Can't forget fanfiction.

Whether I chose to think of my new life as reward or punishment – and as much as having died sucked, I was inclined to think of rebirth in itself as a good thing – there was nothing I could have done to earn this. I wasn't evil, but there have been times when the only reason I avoided doing something terrible was the fear of getting caught. I wasn't a saint, but I honestly intended to live my life being every bit as helpful as I could without driving myself crazy in the process. I never got the chance. Maybe it was the thought that counted, but that didn't answer the question. The fact that I wasn't necessarily the only one and any number of people could be secretly running around with memories of a past life didn't answer the question. Not even fanfiction answered the question.

My new father took out his keys and opened the door of our strangely unharmed apartment.

I decided I'd think about it later.

* * *

The weeks after the attack were a time period I was even less fond of than the haze before it, because pretty much all I remembered from it was the funerals.

I haven't even acknowledged how lucky the three of us have been, manga series or no manga series, until the funerals. There were quick funerals where dozens of people were remembered together and small yet equally hasty ones where the pictures of single people and families were shown. There were funerals of people my parents knew but I've never met, where I could do nothing but stare into space and be as quiet as possible. There were funerals of people I've seen before, even vaguely knew by name, even though I've been trying to ignore it all before their death.

I was present for all of them; clearly, there was no one to stay behind and watch the children. Everyone has lost someone. Or maybe my mother didn't want to leave me out of her sight.

We've had a young neighbor my mother seemed to know only in passing, who gave us her two-year-old daughter's clothes once she outgrew them and sometimes came over for tea. If I cried, it was because the daughter died as well. Intellectually, I realized that children were just as human as adults and even easier to harm, that the mortality rate has historically been so low in my world largely because so many children died. That didn't stop me from being convinced that children weren't supposed be hurt. It was one of the few things I knew with perfect clarity.

Later, for the memorial service of an old couple I didn't recognize, my father brought a bouquet of flowers and prompted me to be the one to put them down.

There were two services I guessed to be collective, one for the fallen soldiers – 'the fallen ninja' sounded too comical, 'the fallen shinobi' too unfamiliar – and one for all those civilians who simply weren't accounted for. There were a lot of people attending both, so many that I couldn't even hear what was being said, let alone understand it, but it was still depressing. Not wrong to the point that I couldn't wrap my head around it, like the loss of a single child. Just depressing.

Eventually, what I guessed to be an eternity after the funeral he must have had, there was a service for the Fourth Hokage, or perhaps some sort of a ceremony to honor his sacrifice. There wasn't one for Kushina Uzumaki.

Of course, there were reconstructions as well. There had to be. I learned to climb to the edge of the sofa, where I could gape out of the window at the ninja running back and forth with supplies that looked entirely too heavy. Sometimes, civilians passed by with things like buckets and paint. My father, whose normal six-days-a-week job was put on hold for the moment, kept coming home dirty and battered with small cartons of fruits, vegetables or dairy products. I didn't know if it was due to rationing or a general lack of stuff, but there was an impressive collection of nonperishables in the spare room so it was a moot question.

In my old world, it was easy to forget that the adults around me have lived through events I was taught in history lessons - largely because they themselves didn't think of it that way. There's been economic hyperinflation, changes of regime, outright military conflict, and don't even get me started on wars that were literally being fought a five hours' flight away from me. For all that I knew about those things, they've never been part of _my_ world.

Here, a war has ended very, very shortly before my birth and my parents kept a food stash in the spare room. I wondered if the real Sakura ever noticed.

I wondered where the fourteen-year-old Kakashi was and how he was taking this mess, because if I had it bad, then no words in any language could describe what's happened to him. One had to keep everything in perspective.

I wondered how the war that would culminate in Hinata's kidnapping would play out – in the story, it never seemed important enough to pay attention - and whether the political conditions that would lead to the Uchiha massacre were already final or if they would take a few more years to cook up.

I wondered where little Naruto was, who was taking care of him and how bad a job they were doing.

I wondered how much I could change, and more importantly, how much I could change for the better.

As of now, not much.

My mother was hesitant to take me outside now, and between loose thought and speculation, all I got was a whole lot of funerals.

* * *

"Sakura, what is this?" my mother asked, pointing at a picture book.

"Pig," I mangled merrily, burning the Hiragana in the bottom of the page into my mind. Or trying. Learning languages like this, completely immersed and cut off from ones past life, wasn't done. Not by me, not by anyone sane with an access to a textbook. I had no idea whether my regression to childhood did anything to help or how soon I could expect to become fluent. I was just grateful that my parents weren't too skeptical at my bursts of unchildlike behavior.

I've always been reasonably good with languages, but as the Naruto manga tried and failed to convey, talent (or prior experience, or a child's brain) wasn't everything; you still had to sit down and learn the vocabulary.

Or repeatedly kick a log.

Later, later.

"And this one?" she asked.

"Cooow," I said. The problem wasn't that I had to learn Japanese. Toddlers tended to be almost hilariously bad at speaking their own language. It took years before they acquired all those complex connotations that separated baby speech from actual speech, and I would be granted that very same timeframe. I knew I could learn, and it wasn't like I had anything better to focus on.

The problem was that if I wanted to achieve anything, I had to learn it perfectly – and ahoy, I suddenly wasn't even thinking about the language anymore.

"That's right! Wait until I tell your daddy!" She flipped the thick board page. "Do you know this one?"

It was a wolf, howling at the edge of a cliff. I gave her a blank stare.

"Wolf," she read slowly, in the overly precise tone she only ever used with me. "Repeat after me. 'Wolf'."

I didn't, because babies didn't do that until much later. There was a difference between sticking out a little and sticking out in a way that could potentially get me in trouble. With the ridiculous treatment children sometimes got in this world, I knew I would have some leeway. My parents were civilians and didn't seem like the type to send me off to the academy at an inhumanely young age (if sending a child there could be considered humane at all), so I was sure I could get away with complying to simple requests ahead of time. But I had to draw the line somewhere if I wanted to... to... what was it that I wanted, again?

Save the world?

Anyhow, I was going to learn the stupid language. I wasn't even one year old yet. For the time being, I had nothing to worry about.

So of course, I did worry. If revealing the truth has been a possibility before - an unpleasant possibility, with people like Orochimaru and Danzo running about - then I've managed to completely dismiss it by now. To say that I loved my new parents would be a bit of a stretch, but I certainly grew attached to them. I couldn't give up my second chance at living just like that.

I drew my face in contemplation.

"It's a wolf," my mother said again, tapping at the picture with a reasonably well-manicured finger. The next page showed a fox in a forest. She conspicuously skipped to the turtle on the page after.

* * *

I woke up. Got through the day. Went to sleep.

Woke up again. Got through another day. Went to sleep.

Woke up in the middle of the night from a dream about my little siblings being eaten by the Kyuubi, only to realize I couldn't see them in the morning to make sure they were safe. I got through a slightly longer day. Went to sleep. Again.

Rinse and repeat.

Time was hard to measure when you spent it all doing nothing. Everything just sort of bled together, weekends and work days alike. It became apparent when you were a student on summer holiday and your parents finally deemed you too old to be forcibly sent to some camp to keep you occupied. It also became apparent when your parents thought you were less than a year old rather than nineteen. Or was I twenty now?

The nineteen-and-a-half years I started using to calculate my total age were more of a rough estimation, albeit one that sounded better than nineteen-years-and-then-a-while-more. For all that I tried not to think about it, for all that my nightmares preferred to center themselves on the people I've lost, I remembered the event of my death with a stabbing clarity. Like a high-definition video in a world of silent film. Minor details like the date paled in comparison – if I even knew them in the first place.

I've always been terrible with dates. In my old world, I cleverly circumvented this flaw by knowing how to operate a calendar, just as I got around my poor sense of direction by playing it off as a quirk and whining at my driving instructor a lot.

(I've always told him I would die in a car accident. It just happened from the wrong side of the windshield.)

Beyond arriving to the right place at the right time, these things never mattered to me. Now, though there was a clock hanging on the kitchen wall, nobody felt the need to entrust me with a planner and I certainly couldn't pick up the date from dialogue; it was one thing to connect a word to an everyday object when it was repeated again and again in the same context, and another thing entirely to take apart a normal-paced conversation and guess whether a phrase referred to someone's age or the weather this morning or the new hairstyle of the next-door neighbor (the one who survived, that is). Maybe the Haruno couple, unlike many other parents, were not the type to flaunt their baby's age like it was somehow their personal achievement that they've avoided poisoning it for so long. Maybe they were. I wouldn't know one from the other.

I had a hard time keeping track of days with my current sleep pattern, let alone weeks and months.

The thing was, I've known enough babies to be able to approximately guess my own age anyhow, just from looking at a mirror. I had no schedule to speak of and my routine didn't require me to actually do anything. The real challenge was to adjust my behavior, something that played out quite nicely because I genuinely didn't understand what was going on around me half of the time. Walking and fine motor skills didn't automatically come to me, either. All in all, I had better things to think about.

It just... irked me. Not knowing my exact age was a testament for how cut off I was from the world, which, I supposed, also didn't really matter. It wasn't irreversible like the losses I've suffered, nor did it loom overhead like the future events I remembered from the manga. The war. The battle against Madara. All these things I had no idea how to prevent.

It was a trite concern. I let it irk me.

(With a bit of more genuine horror, I realized that regardless of _exact_ dates, I would be thirty two years old by the time the series started. It was precisely the kind of thought I didn't want to be thinking. I made myself stop thinking it.)

After all my old plans were deemed useless, I had a bit of trouble grasping the idea of a future. The revelation that I was going to grow up, that I wouldn't stay in the mercy of adults forever, struck me with more force than it had any right to.

This wasn't forever. I wasn't a prisoner in this world, but a child. I would be able to walk and talk again. In a few years, I would be expected to wake up at a set time every morning and do my homework again, which was something I never thought I'd miss.

Eventually, many years into the future, I was going to be a ninja.

How awesome was that?


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